The traditional gender roles of young women in the United States are
changing. According to research reports of the past few decades, women
have taken a more commanding role in sexual relationships with men. These
new roles have, at times, included behavior identified as sexual aggression.
Women's sexual aggression is the focus of this research review. The shift
from a deviance label to a normative label is supported by prevalence data
combined with what we know about the connection between women's beliefs
in male sexual stereotypes and their sexually aggressive behaviors. Discrepancies
between men's and women's reports of women's heterosexually aggressive
behaviors provide additional confirmation of the prevalence of women's
heterosexual aggression and the influence of beliefs in stereotypes. The
advent of our realization of women's sexual aggression raises many questions
that we can not currently answer, but can lead to new research questions
and theories about human sexual aggression.